The dawn was silver and bloodless. Light seeped over the Salt Flats like a blade slicing open a wound—slow, cold, and without warmth.
The Dawnbreakers packed in silence.
They didn't speak of the noise from beneath the salt, nor the way the ground had shivered through the night like a sleeping beast shifting in its dreams. Aera gave the order to move before the sun rose fully, her voice low and urgent.
They left the wreckage of the monolith behind, half-swallowed by salt and time.
No one looked back.
The whispering began around midday.
At first, it was just wind curling strangely through the fissures in the crust. Then came the voices—soft, indistinct, threading through the comms like half-remembered dreams. Names. Pleas. Warnings.
"...Elian…?"
He stiffened, eyes narrowing. "What?"
Aera turned toward him, recognizing the expression on his face—the one that said something isn't right.
"You heard that too?" she asked.
He nodded slowly. "It sounded like my sister's voice."
"But she died years ago."
They stopped.
Every soldier stood still as the wind whipped across the flats. The comms crackled again.
"...why did you leave me…"
Aera turned the channel off. "Shut your helmets. Switch to silent internal."
No one questioned her.
It didn't stop the whispers, though.
They weren't coming from the comms anymore.
They were coming from below.
The salt cracked.
A low tremor rippled beneath their boots, like thunder murmuring beneath their feet. Elian stepped back as a fissure split open just ahead of them, wide enough to swallow a man whole. From within, a gust of frigid air blasted out, tinged with rot and ozone.
Then came the eyes.
Glowing, pale-blue. Dozens of them.
Rising from the depths.
The first of the constructs emerged—tall, insectoid machines with rusted limbs and humming cores. Dezune war-tech, left behind after an old battle and half-consumed by the desert. But something had awakened them.
"Defensive formation!" Elian shouted.
The Dawnbreakers formed a ring, rifles raised.
Aera stepped forward. Her heart pounded—not with fear, but focus. The kind that honed everything to a single moment.
"Fire on my mark!"
The machines moved fast. Too fast for their age.
A dozen skittered out of the fissure, cutting across the salt like blades on glass. Their joints shrieked, their weapons charging with a low hum.
"NOW!"
The flats erupted with gunfire. Blue sparks and flashes tore the white crust into shards. Kerran took one down with a lucky shot to the core, while two more tried to flank the Dawnbreakers from the sides.
Aera and Elian moved like twin flames—one leading with instinct, the other with calculation. Aera dove forward, sliding under a clawed limb and planting a charge beneath its ribbed torso.
Boom.
Salt geysered into the air.
The construct folded in on itself and detonated.
They fought for thirteen minutes.
When it was over, the ground was littered with broken machines, smoke curling up from sparking cores and shredded limbs. The fissure had sealed itself, somehow, as if the salt had swallowed it whole again.
Later, as they moved onward, silence fell over the squad once more.
Elian walked beside Aera.
"We need to mark this region. Map it. There might be more."
Aera nodded. She looked up at the horizon. The sun was beginning to dip, painting the salt a deep orange.
"…You think this was natural?" she asked softly.
"No. I think Dezune buried things here that were never meant to be found."
Aera closed her eyes for a moment.
Another whisper, faint, brushed the edge of her hearing.
She didn't tell anyone this time.